No room behind Ned

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33777, 25 February 1975, Page 18

No room behind Ned

(By

JOHN McNEILL)

Behind all comics a tragic figure? Not so! Mr Harry Secombe (real name — Ned of Wales) ex - Goon, comedian, singer, author, on a return visit foy another concert tour in New Zealand, was quick to refute the statement. “No room behind me for anyone,” he cheerfully exclaimed.

Argue as one liked — Ned does display a more serious side. “At home,” he said, “I shut the door on work, play Bach, watch television documentaries, comics Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper, and try to make it up to my family.” Jenny, his oldest girl, aged 25, is his publicity agent,

Andrew, aged 21, is at the Central School of Speech and Drama preparing for a stage career, and the other son and daughter, with no mention of career, are probably still at school.

In more gleeful mood Ned weighed himself against a stack of his L.P. records, obscuring the face of the scales behind his expansive back, leaving the final result, properly, to be announced by the organisers of the “Guess Ned’s Weight in Records” type contest. Theatre is his favourite medium. “It takes six months to get a laugh from films, television is a little cold, too, but for a comic a live audience is mighty, and the theatre gives a different one every night.” Stung by a description of himself by Mr Milligan — “The shortest man he’d ever

seen in uniform, he looked more like a mobile pair of khaki drill shorts wearing a tin helmet and steel-rimmed glasses — if Rommel had seen this the war could have been prolonged by years” — Secombe turned scrobe to check the dazzling successes of his rival.

Milligan’s impressive rise through the ranks — "My Part in Hitler’s Downfall,” “Rommel? Gunner Who?” — of best sellers, was equalled by his former Goon colleague. Secombe’s fiction story “Twice Brightly” quickly reached the top-ten book list, and Ned was chosen to read his saga of a young comic’s first seven days in the business to the empire on radio’s “Book at Bedtime” series.

“It was quite the most difficult experience of my career,” Ned confessed. “I’d never read it before, I kept wishing I could change bits as I went along.” Two more books are planned, a short story anthology, and a comic novel set during the depression times of the ’3os in Wales. Ned’s mind turned back to his parents. “Depression,” he quipped, “is having to do without things your mother and father didn’t know existed.” This brought to mind a Secombe answer regarding the best advice his father had ever given him. “Don’t do that,” his father had said, “you'll go blind.”